The Second Curtain by Roy Fuller

The Second Curtain by Roy Fuller

published 1953

A girl of some attractiveness…[in] a severely-cut suit in a plain cloth just lighter than navy blue…

By nine o-clock the party had thinned a little but showed no signs of ending. Those who had had dinner or decided to eschew it began to settle down  - on chairs, divans, the stairs – and a rum punch made its appearance, tepid but strong.

 

comments: Roy Fuller was a distinguished poet of the 20^th century, and ended up as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. He was also a solicitor with a long period in the legal department of a building society.

He produced a handful of detective novels, and Julian Symons in his reference book Bloody Murder quotes Roy Fuller as having “pointed out the similarities between the detective story and elements in the Oedipus myth, ‘the illustrious victim, the preliminary riddles, the incidental love interest, the gradual uncovering of the past, the unlikeliest criminal’, and has suggested that it is a harmless and purging surrogate for the Oedipus myth in every writer’s and reader’s life.”

JS was a fan. I have to say that I would not recognize this book particularly from Symons’ descriptions of it, we read it very differently, and I wasn’t such a fan. One thing Symons said was that it was  ‘beautifully composed, the book might serve as a model of how little rather than how much violence is needed to make a successful crime story’ - and that is true.

There is a main character, George Garner, who is a literary man of the kind we all know from these novels. Has had some slight success, not doing so well, no money, lives in squalid lodgings (see also Radio 4’s Ed Reardon, mentioned briefly in this post). He is still hopeful that maybe there will be success, acclaim and money in his future.

He corresponds regularly with an old schoolfriend, Widgery, who went into a family business in a northern manufacturing town, and the letters are a good outlet for both of them.

But then he hears from his friend’s sister, Viola, that Widgery has gone missing. Trying to help, he goes to visit her. It becomes obvious to all of us that Widgery was gay, and had got caught up in a relationship with a much younger man, which may have gone wrong.

Not sure how he can help, Garner goes back to London. He has the chance of a nice job, running a new arts review magazine, and he pursues that, and meets a young woman, Sarah Freeman, who is secretary to the rich industrialist financing his new job.

The ‘Sarah’ touched him: it revealed the difference in their ages. It had been an old-fashioned name in his day: his contemporaries had been called Joan and Marjorie.

[The naming of characters & fashions in names, got a lot of attention on the blog a whle back... and you can read about my party cupcake theory & research]

They go to a literary party in Highgate: it has a hallucinatory feel, and Garner ends up so drunk he doesn’t really know what happened there. It was quite a long interlude – 10 pages – and I would say there wasn’t a single unpredictable word, sentence, incident or idea in it. It is exactly as uninspired as the party is meant to be, and that seems rather disappointing from a noted poet.

There is another death, and some attempts at investigation – Garner tries to find out who borrowed a certain book from the library, a very literary way of tracking someone.

Elsewhere, someone is reading The Ballad and the Source by Rosamond Lehmann, a great favourite on the blog, and mentioned in some of last year’s Lehmann posts. It is now almost completely forgotten, but was reasonably successful when it was published in 1944.

There is quite a good plot buried in The Second Curtain, and in the end it connects up well. But I felt it was too strongly a novel which had been twisted to contain crime elements. I found Fuller’s writing quite affected and annoying, and I have most certainly read enough about men like Garner.

It is slightly surprising that Garner is so hopelessly Bohemian,  as Fuller himself was so respectable – he did live the literary life, but also had a proper job (cf Philip Larkin, TS Eliot). Those parts were convincing but just not enjoyable to read, for me. I felt Fuller had ideas for some things, like the dreary literary party, to get off his chest, and I was resistant to having to read it.

After re-reading the book, and writing this review, I found that Martin Edwards had written about it back in 2009 – here on his blog. We had obv bought the same reprint in 1976, at the same time in our lives (though I was neither lawyer nor poet) and we have similar things to say, although he likes it better than I did.

It did have this excellent cover.

The party picture is from some years later, but I do love the look of it – I have previous form with Beatnik party pictures.